The public festivities will continue with the celebration of a Mass at 11 a.m. Sunday. Archbishop Jose H. Gomez, head of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, will celebrate Mass along with Rev. Adrian M. San Juan of St. Madeleine Catholic Church.

Parishioner Ed Piesik remembers attending services at Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic Church in Claremont in 1963 when the announcement was made of a new parish in northeast Pomona.

St. Madeleine's first pastor, Rev. Robert Gara, leased a storefront building on Holt Avenue, and it was there that Sunday Mass was celebrated for about a year, Piesik said.

"There were probably not more than 100 or so people and probably no more than one or two Masses on Sunday," he recalled.

Work first began on building a school and by the middle of 1964, religious services began being held in a portion of the school that wasn't finished but served as the seventh and eighth grade classrooms.

By late 1964 the church building was under construction.

The walls of the church were built but there was no roof on it but that didn't keep parishioners from gathering there on Christmas Eve 1964 for midnight Mass.

Parishioner Tom Tancredi remembers that day.

"It was safe enough to have midnight Mass," he said recalling the evening was one filled with stars. "It was pretty darn magical."

Fifty years after parishioners began meeting in the storefront for services the members of St. Madeleine have something in come with those who were part of the establishment of the parish, Tancredi said.

"It's the basic intent of taking care of the spiritual and emotional" needs of the members of the parish and those around them, he said.